Twists and turns in Encinitas school yoga lawsuit

Crazily, this disharmonic convergence over yoga in Encinitas schools is getting too close to call.

When I first heard last fall that a small group of parents opposed classroom yoga on religious grounds, I took the laid-back Leucadia-style view that free stretch classes are a gift that suits Encinitas to a Lululemon T.

These inflexible folks don’t know the difference between yoga and yogurt, I joked.

As is often the case, my perspective, which I believe is shared by the vast majority of families in the district, is colored by firsthand experience.

My wife, a retired Francis Parker teacher, is now a yoga instructor who, in her much younger days, also taught transcendental meditation.

Though I’m a haphazard (emphasis on the hazard) and temperamentally secular yoga student, the namaste sort of stuff doesn’t bother me in the least. To me, yoga is about balance, strength, stretch and breath, none of which puts me in mind of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism or Western metaphysics, a link that’s taken as given in a lawsuit filed by the Escondido-based National Center for Law & Policy against officials with the Encinitas Unified School District.

What we’re dealing with here are the diverse eyes of beholders. In what context is yoga perceived?

Though I personally think it’s an example of weird motivated reasoning, some Christian conservatives evidently see yoga, no matter how neutral the presentation, as an inherently religious devotion that, by law, should not be part of the school curriculum.

All religious overtones have been rigorously “stripped out” from the exercises, counters the district, which accepted a $500,000 grant from the Encinitas-based Jois Foundation to teach — and study the effects of — Ashtanga yoga in public schools.

While I believe it’s way better than even money that regular yoga would help American students, many of whose minds and bodies are overloaded with junk, some Christian conservatives also believe that daily prayer sessions would improve the well-being of students. (We know how well that’s turned out.)

So what’s the difference?

To me, there’s a huge difference. But to the Sedlock family, plaintiffs in the lawsuit, yoga stretches the body but also moves the mind, taking it on a religious journey. If prayer is unconstitutional, yoga should be, too.

“Because Protestant Christianity has played a dominant role in American history, many Americans have been slow to recognize non-Christian religious practices — such as yoga — as religion. Protestants, and those influenced by Protestant reasoning, privilege the ‘Word’ … Protestants have been prone to misunderstand embodied traditions in which practice itself is itself an expression of religious devotion. For many Hindus and Buddhists, for instance, religious significance exists directly in the doing, rather than secondarily in believing or saying something while performing bodily or mental practices. … In the religious origins of yoga, body and spirit are not separable categories — as supposed by Cartesian mind-body dualism — but aspects of each other, and bodily practices are spiritual as well as physical. From such a perspective, it would make little sense to isolate bodily practices from spiritual purposes — as those promoting the EUSD yoga program claim to do.”

Boiled down, Brown is saying that striking yoga poses is as religiously freighted as reciting The Lord’s Prayer. Stretching on their mats, the children of Encinitas are being called to the minaret, so to speak.

A large part of me — the part that loves children and worries that many of them are being driven nuts by contemporary life — has one word to say to Brown: Rubbish.

If you’re doing a downward-facing dog, you’re not in touch with the cosmos. You’re in touch with your flexibility, or, as in the case of tennis-playing tin men like me, the lack of it. (When I play in senior tournaments, I routinely remind myself to breathe deeply between points. Am I communing with the divine? No, I’m trying my damnedest to win.)

But I have to confess, a small part of me is reluctantly swayed by the lawsuit’s central argument. I can imagine a judge siding with the contrarian plaintiffs, one of whom — mother Jennifer Sedlock — is a well-known motivational speaker who clearly is not shying away from this high-profile Christian prizefight.

Much like transcendental meditation, yoga does have exotic baggage — Indian carpetbags, if you will. In court, expert historians like Brown will stress the mystic trappings of yoga, whereas the district will emphasize its modernity as a mainstream exercise regimen. Both have points. Instinctively, I side with the district.

However, if we think of yoga in its full context, we conjure up indispensable wise men — for example, Paramahansa Yogananda, guiding spirit of the Encinitas Self-Realization Fellowship, as well as Pattabhi Jois himself — and we know by their beatific sense of ease that what they’re about is a far, far cry from Jack LaLanne doing one-armed push-ups in his jumpsuit.

Prediction:No judge will laugh this lawsuit out of court. It has long, limber legs. God knows how it all winds up.